I’ll leave it to the New York Times review to sum this up perfectly:

The problem with “The Reflecting Pool,” an investigative drama that mucks around with 9/11 conspiracy theories, is not that its ideas are silly. Strictly from an imaginative point of view, there is something unnerving about the weirdly elegant way the towers fell. And not just the north and south buildings but also the adjacent 7 World Trade Center, a smaller edifice, suffering much less damage, that collapsed in an identical manner but received far less coverage from — what’s the phrase I’m looking for? — oh yes: a complicit, propaganda-foisting media/industrial complex in the pocket of the Bush administration and the Jews and the oil industry!

Er, to continue. The problem, which dwarfs whatever you might feel about the topic, is in the drama, or utter lack thereof. Written and directed by Jarek Kupsc, the movie has the tone, rhythm and structure of a set of numbered, handwritten notes derived from 9/11 conspiracy Web sites, photocopied at Kinko’s and distributed at an anarchist bookshop.

This pamphlet narrative follows the efforts of Alex Prokop (Mr. Kupsc again), an investigative journalist for a lefty magazine about to “go corporate,” and Paul Cooper (Joseph Culp), a 9/11 obsessive whose daughter died in the attack, to unearth the truth in the face of suppressed information, disturbing ambiguities and, when needling the powers that be, their own amateurism.

It’s perfect because the reviewer’s right – it’s basically just a series of articles put into dialog. But it also shows how little attention this issue gets. The reviewer spends no time discussing whether the ideas may be valid, and it’s mostly just mockery – which is the point of the movie itself.

Here are some smart people on the topic:

http://www.ae911truth.org/

http://www.stj911.org/

Watched this. Sort of another “Zeitgeist,” except it’s fairly right wing (as opposed to Libertarian) and full of contradictions. The elite are pagans out to create a world that worships the earth so the answer is…paganism. A strange mixture of New Age spirituality and right wing rhetoric. Has this alarmingly stupid sentence: “Global Warming is a fallacy.” Has a Glenn Beck voice over. Pro-gun to save us from “tyranny.”

Put all that together and it sounds fairly stupid. But it does have some interesting quotes and footage and I’m always impressed by people who put together these comprehensive anti-establishment docs. Just need to be able to sift through it.

I couldn’t make it through the sequel.

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

Here’s what I wrote in April 2009:

Because I’m an avowed conspiracy theorist, I believe there’s got to be more to the torture story than merely “trying to get information.” When you’re waterboarding someone 183 times, there’s something else happening….This really seems like pure sadism at work – or possibly practicing the technique to be used on other people. Or seeing the effect of multiple bouts of torture on the human psyche – i.e. experimentation, nothing to do with gaining information.

Read Truthout’s comprehensive history of the mind control/torture projects MK Ultra and Project Artichoke – no conspiracy theory here.

Houston, who had served the Agency as its doyen general counsel for over 25 years, secretly huddled on at least two occasions in June 1975 with Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief assistant, Richard Cheney. Houston impressed upon both men that any prolonged and intense media scrutiny of Project Artichoke would lead to opening a Pandora’s box of legal, institutional, international and public relations problems that could destroy the CIA….

Houston additionally explained to Rumsfeld and Cheney that, along with the release of MK/ULTRA details to the media, the names of a few former CIA employees, such as Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, would also be released to the press. Incredibly, when the subject of possible federal prosecutions of CIA officials for capital crimes and felonies, such as murder and drug trafficking, came up in their discussion, Houston informed Rumsfeld and Cheney that there was little cause for concern.

Obama’s protection of this program is one of the bigger mysteries – suggesting that it’s way worse than what has thus far been revealed.  Like people claim UFO disclosure would shatter the fabric of society, the disclosure of these torture programs might shatter people’s faith in government.

Good debunking stuff here.

Meanwhile: Bill Gates pays for ‘artificial’ clouds to beat greenhouse gases

The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.

That’s Bill Gates and the London Times.  Occasionally, conspiracy theorists are right.

Though I find elements of Paul’s outlook interesting, I also think libertarianism is impractical. Yes, a stateless utopia via the Venus Project is a nice idea, but it’s not possible currently with the current U.S. system. You could argue that the system necessarily needs to fall apart in order to usher in a new stateless system, and given human instincts, libertarianism would probably usher in that downfall faster than any other system. As has been proven countless times, if the unfettered free market is given free reign to do whatever it wants, it sides with abuse of the planet and its people. To have government intervene with new regulation isn’t proof of creeping fascism, it’s proof that humans won’t do the right thing if they have the choice not to.

Whenever anyone cries socialism about Obama I recoil – it’s just such an inaccurate reading of the tea leaves.  If Obama was a Communist, he wouldn’t be making the far left so angry.  He’s a Clinton centrist, and for that reason he’s a disappointment.  I figured he was running towards the center for the election and would be a bit more open when he finally got into office.  And by open, I mean, yes, more socialist.

The problem we’re in is that we’re in a corporatocracy, so anything that takes away corporate power is fine by me.  But some conspiracy theorists and the “small government” right see nefarious encroachment in any government – which doesn’t make sense.  All government isn’t evil.  Of course not.  At what point do libertarians draw the line at regulations?  I’m glad my tap water doesn’t kill me, for one.  Much regulation is reasonably self-protecting.

Doubtlessly, the entire system needs reworking because people are basically forced into a system in which their income doesn’t much exceed their basic needs, so they’re tied endlessly to the 40 hour work week.  People then blame taxes for their troubles, but really they should be blaming the amount of their paycheck, not the amount that goes to taxes – how much profit is the business making relative to what its paying its employees? Make no mistake, if the monthly paycheck was higher, people wouldn’t be so concerned with the amount taken out by taxes. Perhaps that makes me a Communist – because I see no fault in there being some equality between what a business owner makes and what an employee makes. Perhaps not equal, but some better disparity is more equitable.

Likewise, the hardliner conspiracy-minded rightwing that scream about the global warming “hoax” also makes me want to flee. The mounting scientific evidence aside, the fact that global warming is inspiring more environmental awareness can only be positive. At my kid’s school, there’s a board where kids have created collages saying “Protect the earth” and so on. Some would call this “indoctrination.” It’s not because at its core, it’s positive.

If you look at the rhetoric of the right – libtards, et al. – it doesn’t take into account how Teabagger-style angry the left is about the state of the country.  For example, Game Over:

Without a single iota of hyperbole, it may now be said that regulatory capture of our government by Wall Street has been concluded. Done deal. Since Monday, the sheer volume of news supporting the truth that Wall Street essentially controls our government has become–quite simply–overwhelming.

It is the total sellout of Main Street and our country as a whole that’s been all but concluded before our very eyes. To call it anything less than that would be inaccurate reportage.

It’s beyond disgusting, IMHO. Words cannot convey my sense of contempt…that to which we’re bearing witness today.  It is the definition of betrayal.

That sounds exactly like Teabagger hysteria, but unlike “Obama is a socialist,” this one has some merit.  It’s actually closer to fascism – the marriage of corporations and government – except that doesn’t make Obama a fascist, because this is an ideology perpetrated by the right much more than what remains of the left in power.  An idea very much lost on the right wing.  The purpose of a government health care plan, for example, is not “socialism,” but to take power away from Blue Cross and other corporations who are screwing their consumers.

Where the right stupidly think Obama represents a socialist takeover, they don’t seem to realize that they basically have a Republican, corporate-centered candidate who is stripping regulation, not adding more government “interference.”  People’s sense of logic really does seem to be devolving – though I imagine this is how it’s always been.  Stupidity has no generation:

More in this vein:

There’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Think that’s from a Paulite conspiracy screed?  Joe Stack’s manifesto?  No, it’s from The Atlantic.

Obama is enough to make one paranoid – I’ll grant conspiracists that.  In the sense that he had more honest idealism during the campaign (wasn’t entirely just exploiting people’s hopes) and then once he was handed the reins he learned – this is how it really works.  I continually can’t get my head around a system that is continually built so that it destroys itself.  He seems to be playing the same game as everyone else.  Basically, all of Obama’s slogans were crap: “Change doesn’t happen from the top down, but from the bottom up.”  “We’re the change we’ve been waiting for.”  “This is the moment.” Etc.  The crash from all that hope is pretty stark.

I’m glad I didn’t see Zeitgeist until now because in 2008, during Obama’s rise, I wouldn’t have wanted to absorb it.  The primary and election season were a fucking lot of fun.  It felt like Kennedy – don’t insert Kennedy’s bad policies here, on a more thematic level than that.  I’ve held on for a long time that Obama’s presidency was transformative enough by just who he is, but basically all we get with Obama is financial collapse at a slower rate than would have happened with McCain/Palin.

So I’m kind of in no man’s land. Too liberal for the libertarian right, and too whacked out entertaining 9-11 truth, UFO’s, et al. for the Daily Kos left.  I’m not sure such a forum exists.  So I’m writing here.

The Venus Project clearly separates the Zeitgeist movement from other conspiracy theorizing from the likes of Alex Jones or David Icke – who seem mainly to be fear peddlers without any real answer to moving on from that fear. That’s what disturbs me about them. Obama may be a disappointment who is tasked with rescuing an unsustainable system, but he is not equal to the Bush legacy. The sheer fact that he’s a black man with the name Barack Obama shows that we’re inching closer to a more open society. I don’t think you can underestimate that, even if his promise of change is not really arriving – and most likely can’t because “rescuing banks” is the process of rescuing something that caused the problem. But Jones and Icke want to see totalitarianism everywhere and then sell that fear, so they will look for evidence wherever they can. Their terror alert level doesn’t seem much more honest than the one perpetrated by the Bush administration.

The Venus Project is in part what makes Zeitgeist so convincing, because it offers a level-headed alternative amidst some very far out claims. What this vision of utopia doesn’t see to emphasize is our potential for spiritual evolution, as well as economic and technological progress.  Daniel Pinchbeck, in 2012, rails against the concept of the Singularity, as it sees technology as solving all our problems, when his more-New Age stance is that a kind of mind technology is more important for our progress than literal technology.  If we see technology as the savior, we’ll be less inclined to explore and expand consciousness and tap into the greater world of outer and inner space.  There’s something to this.

Perhaps the Venus Project could usher that in because only until we become less warlike we’d be given access to other worlds.  Otherwise we might abuse the privilege, as we abuse everything.  What’s attractive to me about a techno utopia is that it satisfies both needs – technological and spiritual, as the technological would free us to spend more time with spiritual and creative pursuits.  And it’s more practical and feasible to create a sustainable environment than waiting for an evolution that never comes.

The Maya, after all, were technologically advanced, and going “back to nature” doesn’t necessarily mean being free from technology.  The Na’vi from Avatar are nice and all, but I don’t want to sleep in a hammock in a tree – I like my computer and the copy of Logic that allows me to record music.  That’s not a distraction like TV, it enhances the potential for creativity. So on that front I agree with the Venus Project and its aim to use technology to create an environmentally sustainable world that frees people from the mindless and unnecessary work that makes up most people’s workdays.  If a true Theory of Everything incorporates both the religious and the scientific (determining the “why” as well as the “how”), then it would seem an advanced society would incorporate both as well.  My worry is that our entire structure needs to fall apart first in order for it to be rebuilt as something better.

I’m currently reading (among other things) A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, which makes the supposition that people are at their best amid total catastrophe.  Most people have no doubt seen this, even if they’ve never been part of a disaster, as the collective support after 9-11 shows how disaster can inspire goodwill.  That’s not entirely a positive prospect, as it may just be the case that the world system needs to collapse in order for us to start over with a better blank slate.  The environment might go to war with us before we go to war with each other as a form of self-protection.  Either way, we seem to be headed in that direction, and troubling as it may be, how else do you reform a world of 8 billion people that needs instant reforming?  I suppose everyone could take Ayahuasca at once, and blow everyone’s heads open, but somehow I don’t see that happening.

Whatever the case, Zeitgeist and the Venus Project are literal manifestations of my novel and the soundtrack so I’ve been glued to finding out new information about these two developments – “The New City is my home and I love all I know.”  Cool to me too that the filmmaker writes and records his own music.

More: Who is Peter Joseph?

Powerful, effective.  If the issue of 9-11 truth gives you jitters, you might be put off by part 2, but you should at least investigate it before dismissing it out of hand.  But part one makes an enormously compelling case for the cross-pollination of world myths and how Jesus’s death and resurrection is nothing more than the death and resurrection of the sun during winter.  I had hints of this – Christmas is a pagan holiday – but never entirely knew what this signified.  “Oh my God,” I said out loud a few times.  At the same time, there’s always a part of you that doesn’t want to believe this – it hurts almost.  Because to find out that the entire basis of Western civilization is actually false is pretty shattering.  Even if parts of this idea are up for debate – the movie no doubt has its detractors – the connection between Christian and pagan rituals is undeniable.

The film is along the lines of a book I recently reviewed by Darryl Sloan, called Reality Check, which is more of a personal story of one person coming to terms with his Christian upbringing and the incongruities in that religion, as well as how vilified he was for his break with the church.  It’s most important message is that one must investigate something fully before decrying it as bullshit.  If you watch the movie or read Darryl’s book and still have your worldview, then fine: you’ve done the work.  But do the work.  Darryl Sloan’s book is highly recommended and can be read and downloaded for free on Scribd.

I recently did an interview with Alterati, where I get into how 9-11 was the impetus behind my writing The American Book of the Dead.  I sort of cop out when it come to the question of 9-11 truth.  I say I’ve “entertained” the idea.  Mainly because it’s fairly embarrassing – because it’s so vilified.  It’s not fun to be vilified.  On Daily Kos, if you didn’t know, they censor any mention of 9-11 truth.  This does make some sense because it would affect the credibility of the site if it the site devolved into conspiracy theory – no matter how convincing that theory might be.  But that’s the zeitgeist for the moment – the mainstream story about 9-11.

The movie could be more convincing about proving the thermite theory and the impossibility of the building’s falling how they did.  Beyond WTC 1 and 2, Building 7 really makes no fucking sense.  Nor does the fact that there’s no evidence of a plane having crashed at the Pentagon.  Those two things alone are enough to reasonably ask: What the hell? without being shouted down as a delusional idiot.  That Daily Kos can despise every act perpetrated by the Bush administration, from the Iraq war to the economy and beyond, but not think they’re capable of 9-11 is puzzling – the same vitriolic hatred for Dick Cheney is given to truthers.  Somehow, the administration was evil enough to lie their way to go to war in Iraq, but not evil enough to basically do the same thing in New York City.

I find it interesting as well that on Daily Kos (a place where I spend a fair amount of time, by the way, because I do enjoy following mainstream political debate in the same way I like following trades in baseball) that it’s mainly peopled by atheists.  As if you have to be open a bit more to something else being behind the spiritual curtain to entertain the thought of a 9-11 conspiracy.  If you don’t then you demand an impossible amount of proof for each, even if there is a lot of available proof, or at least compelling research.  Enough to say, “What if?” without condemning it out of hand.  So perhaps I should own up to what I believe: in the possibility of God and that the government is capable of terrible things.  The government, after all, goes to war.

The Fed

Part 3 gets into the Federal Reserve – something that I’ve glossed over in relation to the Ron Paul movement, mainly because he’s a Republican and Libertarian, and I’m not an advocate that small government is the answer.  In many ways what we need is more government, more regulation, more social programs.  Anarchy would be, well, anarchy.  I’m not a New World Order fanatic who sees all government as an attempt to take control of our lives.  Or, rather, I don’t think all control is necessarily a negative, because the world is a disaster area and creating a new system with a one world government and one world religion could potentially be seen as progress – if done correctly.  So the North American Union doesn’t automatically strike me as a bad idea.

Now to tie this together with other demented leanings I have.  I mention this in the interview with Alterati – I believe in the possibility that Cheney orchestrated the 9-11 attacks, or at least let them happen.  Even if he didn’t, the Iraq war was waged under false pretenses and has all the hallmarks of a perpetual war meant to enrich certain people.  What I don’t get is why they need all this money – just “to be rich” makes very little sense.  After hitting a certain level of wealth, money stops mattering.  “To be powerful” seems a little weak as well.  I’ve always been puzzled about how ties together with my other main pet belief: UFOs.  If anyone knows the secrets behind the UFO conspiracy it’s families like the Bush’s, and men like Dick Cheney.  So what on earth does the UFO phenomenon have to do with this raping the planet for profit and creating perpetual war?  What on earth does the UFO phenomenon have to do with right wing ideology?

What I came up with in my novel is that all of this degradation is by design: to lead up to the Big One, World War III, that will diminish the population to such a degree that first contact could be possible, and we could then start a technological utopia.  They want control over this uncontrollable world so that humanity can graduate to whatever’s ahead.  The plan is not necessarily 100% nefarious.  And if – as my novel pontificates – death does not exist and there is an afterlife, then war has less consequence, even if it causes so much immense pain.

Just a theory of course, and the movie doesn’t touch on it.  I wish the movie didn’t quote from LaRouche or Lou Dobbs or Alex Jones, who’s pretty deeply conservative – and if you’re talking about peddling fear for profit, that’s his M.O.  I remember a piece he did about going behind the scenes at Bohemian Grove and decrying how everyone there worships the “occult.”  If we go back to part one of this piece, an occult “perennial philosophy” in which all religions are different versions of the same idea, is a more honest spiritual disposition.  Jones’s point was that it’s “un-Christian,” which doesn’t strike me as a bad pose to take.

Now if all this is true, and they’re doing this to eventually instigate a NWO, why all the secrecy, why all the murder?  Seems like there’s a better way of going about this than unleashing so much pain – which then makes the NWO nefarious, because the events leading up to the NWO are so destructive and anti-human.  It’s like they’re fucking things up on purpose – why would corporatists want to live in a raped, climate-changed world?  It seems to have a purpose beyond just carelessness, or even the lust for money and power. Again, this was the major impetus behind The American Book - that they’re after some kind of progress.

Maybe I’m holding on to a naive faith in people – as well as a belief that we need some order in a disordered world. The movie ends with words about how “we’re all the same,” and “one planet” which is why a one world government – absent implanting microchips in all of us, which is where the movie really lost me – could potentially be a manifestation of this idea.  Seems a pretty roundabout way of going about it, though. If industry stressed sustainability, this could have positive potential without destroying everything first.

Zeitgeist: Addendum

Also fascinating, and worth watching.  Eye-opening material on the failures of our monetary system, offering an actual solution with discussion of the Venus Project.  Ironically, it’s my theory (one possible theory) that perhaps the one world government scenario is to lay the foundation for a Venus Project type of utopia.  Otherwise, upending our current monetary system could possibly lead to its own type of apocalypse.  In this sense, you need “control” of people in order to usher in the next stage.  This system needs to fail, which may be why the current system seems almost masochisticly bent on failure, perhaps to usher in a new system.

Really, that’s the underlying hope behind all conspiracy theory – even theory that ramps up the fear: that there’s a purpose to all this, and the “elite” are out there planning something.  Nothing is just arbitrary and meaningless.  It’s the same reason that some people, including myself, want to believe in God.  A purposeless existence in which there’s more pain than light is fairly depressing.  It’s in fact more depressing than worrying about a New World Order.  At least with the NWO you feel like you’re in on a great secret, like a priest who knows what the Gods are working on.  That’s pretty exciting, and easily clouds judgment.

If you think all of this is ludicrous, please watch the movies, and then we’ll talk.  It makes me sort of nauseous to be this naked about these types of beliefs, but if this sort of fuel is still with me nine years after I got into this type of info, post 9-11 when I started doing a lot of research in the run-up to writing my novel, I may as well own up to it.

More

Zeitgeist – Orientation Presentation: more info along these lines – mostly centered around the collapse of our financial institution.  If you want to take issue with the movie’s stance on religion or 9-11, do so, but it’s hard to deny our current economic system is unsustainable.

The Zeitgeist Movement – Frankly, this creeps me out a bit. I know if things are to change dramatically, there needs to be a revolution of like-minded thinkers. But I also think this movement could inspire a religious-like cult following. Though the evidence around 9-11 is compelling, it’s not incontrovertible, so it has to be taken in part on faith. As always, faith can lead to bad motivation.  NWO paranoia seems more than a little faith-based, and tends to see connections everywhere with limited evidence, which is why I don’t find it especially interesting.  And taking the movie as irrefutable truth doesn’t make sense, especially when there are inaccuracies in the movie. It would be ironic to take everything in a movie like Zeitgeist as gospel.  The purpose of the movie is to challenge some of your current assumptions – it does that.  There’s plenty in the movie worth considering.  But check out:

A site debunking Zeitgeist. Another one at Conspiracy Science.

A video debunking the debunking (Part 1).

The Reality Sandwich review, which is pretty dead-on:

Zeitgeist may have sacrificed a measure of precision for a greater degree of suggestion, but through that act it ripped open a hole in the mythological framework of American society. Millions of minds are at this very moment pouring through the fissure. This is why Zeitgeist simply is what It Is, a reflection of this particular moment in time and space, while at the same time serving as a tool of cultural, and potentially social, transformation.

Finally, Blog Talk Radio with filmmaker Peter Joseph.  Yes, I got a little obsessed, but I think this is an important development, even if you disagree with it.

Liberal Man meets Conservative Man
Conservative Man wears his myth on his skin
Liberal Man has to explain his and keeps his shirt all buttoned up
Conservative Man greets Liberal Man with a well-rehearsed cold stare
Liberal Man replies by issuing forth horseshit
Conservative Man retaliates by taking the concrete reality of the
situation and lodging it, like a wedge, right between both sides of
Liberal Man’s brain
Liberal Man is caught off guard by this apparent non-abstraction
There is one full minute of confusion
Liberal Man becomes Conservative Man
Conservative Man becomes Liberal Man
War is declared
Liberal Man cheats by calling in reinforcements
Conservative Man is set upon by a mob and murdered
Said mob then turns on Liberal Man and he dies a broken man

Something has happened in America. The teabagging right has sucked all the fun out of being a conspiracy theorist. When I began writing The American Book of the Dead, we were in the middle of the Bush administration, and I let some of my paranoia get the better of me. Part of the reason it took me a few years to write was because I had to get some of that paranoia out of my system or the book would start reading like a tract rather than a novel. But at one point in my life I had a deep-seated fear of the people in power. My novel’s about a president who declares himself the Anti-Christ in order to start Armageddon and usher in the Second Coming of Christ. I actually believed at one point that George Bush jr. was capable of this type of hysteria. The Bush administration seemed to be proving right all the paranoid rantings of people like Alex Jones and Jim Marrs. The Patriot Act exists: it’s not a fabrication.

One of the disappointments of Obama’s election was seeing how seamlessly conspiracy theorists switched from Bush to Obama, as if they’re identical. And it proved Robert Anton Wilson’s theory that conspiracy theorists are just “adrenaline addicts.” They like having something to fear. It gives you pleasant little self-righteous jolt that you really know what’s happening and there’s an actual enemy that can be defeated. And now that type of conspiracy theory has entered the mainstream. By holding up pictures of Dachau to protest the health care bill, teabaggers have drained the enjoyment out of believing in conspiracies.

But it’s also made me wonder if my book could possible be adopted (read: misunderstood) by the far right. After all, it’s about a president who declares himself to be the Anti-Christ (see: Obama) based on widely paranoid musings about what’s really going on behind the scenes (see: Democrats are socialist Nazis). And then I think, nah, my president is a Christianist zealot who’s corrupted Christianity past recognition. He’s a hell of a lot more Sarah Palin than Barack Obama.

Another point though that’s been troubling me is how all of my books could be read as conservative tracts. My first novel, The Golden Calf, is about a celebrity stalker targeting the superficiality and vapidity in Hollywood. The “liberal Hollywood elite” is something very often criticized by the right. The Golden Calf is heavily inspired by “Taxi Driver,” and considering the climate of today, Travis Bickle could be seen as a kind of teabagger assassin – he targets a politician and laments the breakdown of society. Sounds like today’s rhetoric from the right. You could say, Yes, exactly, it’s the portrait of a deranged teabagger – it is, after all, based on Arthur Bremer, an actual assassin. But Travis Bickle is actually a positive model in a sense – because he accurately portrays a certain kind of anger, loneliness, and alienation. That I can get behind – the Dachau-wielding lunatics (also borne of anger and alienation) are totally foreign to me.

My second novel, North of Sunset, was actually criticized for being conservative. On Ready Steady Book, the critic wrote:

This book and all such books could be read as a Marxist fable. The unfettered wealth that public individuals enjoy could build hospitals, get the homeless off the street. And god knows, any reader of Holy Moly and Popbitch will know that many celebrities are complete arseholes. Yet the deeper moral of this book is unflinchingly conservative…These are essentially reactionary, Hobbesian theories. Rousseau said that man is born free, but is everywhere in chains; Hobbes, Houllebecq and Henry Baum are saying that the individual has an unlimited capacity for evil and violence and must therefore be kept subject to authority, restraint and checks.

I don’t actually agree with that sentiment, but it’s a possible interpretation. In The American Book of the Dead, the novel begins with a father discovering his daughter doing porn online – to me, a pretty archetypal example of how society can disintegrate. Everyone’s daughter suddenly doing porn is not automatically an example of liberation and progress. When the father confronts his daughter, he says,

“Believe me, you know I’m no conservative. But given the world heading where it is, I think it’s important to fight the good fight.”

If I hadn’t included the line, “I’m no conservative,” you might think that this is a puritan’s view of the world. A man – like Glenn Beck – longing for “simpler times.”

What it comes down to is this: the world is fucked up.  Politicians wield power horribly.  But somehow the right have adopted a certain kind of indignation I once kept as my own. And because they give lie by saying things like, “Health care will kill you,” it gives lie to that kind of indignation.  It sucks: they’ve distorted everything.

Part of the fun of conspiracy theories is having a sense of humor about it, knowing how ridiculous they are.  Once you leap over the edge and believe in them unquestioningly, you’re not a free thinker anymore, you’re a fanatic.  And these are the people who hold up the banner of “freedom.”  Terrifying, and they’re creeping closer to the mainstream.  I want my spook country back.